InsightIQ

If you’re remotely managing a Linux machine, you’ll probably use an SSH connection to run commands on that machine. There’s one problem with this approach: if you close the SSH connection, any long-running jobs/commands will halt. If you know a job will take a long time and you won’t be able to babysit the SSH connection, you can plan accordingly. But what if you underestimated the time a job will take, and you need to disconnect anyway? Here’s how to keep the job running AND make it home in time for dinner!

While upgrading OneFS it’s important to keep the InsightIQ software version compatible with the Isilon systems. In this case, InsightIQ wasn’t updated for a while and I had to upgrade from 3.0 -> 3.1 -> 3.2 -> 4.x. The actual upgrade process isn’t too hard (it just takes a lot of time), but there’s one little prerequisite in the 3.1 -> 3.2 upgrade: a minimum free space in the root partition of 502MB. As you can see in the screenshot, I wasn’t even close to the minimum requirement. I got to 357 MB, and that’s after cleaning up redundant stuff. Time to add some more disk space and extend root partition!

A couple of months ago InsightIQ 3.0 was released. This new release offers improvements in the interface and under the hood, especially when paired with OneFS 7.1. Upgrading is straightforward, done in under 30 minutes and also makes sure you’re not affected by the Heartbleed bug. Start clicking!

Once your Isilon cluster is up and running you’ll want to keep an eye on it. A piece of software that’s extremely useful to monitor both performance and capacity usage is InsightIQ. Very easy to set-up, it’s extremely powerful both in pro-active and reactive monitoring scenarios. Either sit back and watch the scheduled reports land in your mailbox or take a more active approach and drill down to find the source of a performance problem. Let’s explore further!